After years of painstaking restoration, the Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts this week put on display its collection of French Art Nouveau posters by artists including Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, Theophile Steinlen and Alphonse Mucha.
The exhibition shows 140 posters in several halls, one of which is decorated with park benches and mock-ups of Parisian billboards. While the show concentrates on advertisements, it also has a section for political works, including Steinlen's famous poster for the socialist newspaper Le Petit Sou featuring a woman in red brandishing her broken chains.
Most of the signed lithographs come from the collection of pre-revolutionary Moscow industrialist Fyodor Fyodorov, curator Irina Nikiforova said Monday. He collected only posters, giving preference to French artists.
Others formerly belonged to Nikolai Basnin, a lawyer whose large collection was nationalized after the October Revolution, or the engraver Nikolai Mosolov, who died in 1914, leaving many of his artworks to the Rumyantsev Museum, which closed in the 1920s and had its holdings spread around Soviet museums.
The works on display are only a fraction of the Pushkin Museum's poster collection, which numbers 4,000 items, Nikiforova said. These include posters from Germany, Britain and a "very big collection" from the United States. These will also go on public view eventually, the curator promised.
The posters were not shown for many years, not because their commercial subject matter offended the Soviet authorities, but simply because their condition was too fragile, Nikiforova said. "They needed serious treatment and restoration."
"Dozens of advertising posters were literally crumbling to death because of the over-dry paper and many years of being stored in rolls," the notes to the exhibition read, adding that the works on display are now almost as bright as when they were new.
In charge of the restoration of the French posters was Nadezhda Knorre, a specialist in graphics who has worked at the Pushkin Museum for about 50 years. She began restoring some of the pieces in the 1970s, Nikiforova said. "It's rather laborious work."
Among the posters on display are Mucha's 1896 poster for the play "La Dame Aux Camelias" starring Sarah Bernhardt, and two posters by Toulouse-Lautrec advertising cafe-concerts by the red-haired dancer Jane Avril. There are also iconic images, such as several Michelin Man advertisements designed by the artist O'Galop.
The Russian avant-garde artist Natalia Goncharova is also represented with a poster using geometrical shapes and dramatic lettering that she drew for a 1923 charity ball to raise money for emigre artists. She lived in France from 1915 onwards and worked as a stage designer for Sergei Diaghilev.
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